Administrative/Biographical History

Alfred Bernard Celestine Jr was born in Los Angeles on 3 June 1949. He grew up in Ridgecrest, California. He attended Burroughs High School, where he was one of the only Black students in his class. He excelled academically, and in his final year made it to the finals of the National Speech Tournament. Celestine enrolled at Fresno State in 1967, and took classes in sociology, computing and drama. In 1969 he transferred to the new interdisciplinary Black Studies programme at UC Riverside. He became heavily involved in the Black Student Union (BSU). 

Celestine from this period onwards would experience mental health issues and, that combined with the political turmoil of the time, led Celestine to began to publish his poems. The circumstances of Celestine’s departure from the US aren’t clear. He graduated with a major in sociology, and came out to his family soon after. 

By September 1975, Celestine was in Greece, but his passport has so many stamps it’s hard to make sense of his travels. He visited Macedonia, spent time in Berlin and seems to have settled in Britain by 1977. He got a job at Joe Allen’s, a fashionable restaurant and bar in Covent Garden, where he worked for several years as a waiter. 

Celestine published two books of poetry: Confessions of Nat Turner (The Many Press, 1978), which has some claim to being the first book of poetry published by a Black gay man living in Britain, and Passing Eliot in the Street (Nettle Press, 2003). His poems were known for fierce, lyrical verse exploring race, queerness and displacement. 

Later in life, Celestine worked with Transport for London and later worked taking notes for the Home Office prosecution in immigration cases. As late as 2007 he was participating in arts workshops with Positive East, an HIV support group in East London. After his death from heart disease in 2009 there was a memorial reading at the Camden Eye in Kentish Town.